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: Wister Walcott is the co-founder and vice president of products at Marin Software. Walcott is an experienced technology executive with proven sales and marketing expertise.

Prior to Marin Software, Wister was vice president of marketing at Composite Software, an innovative analytics middleware vendor. He also served as vice president of marketing at Pilot Network Services, an Internet security provider that went public in 1998.

Ban Negative Keywords To Boost Conversion

Written on: May 23rd 2008
Author: by Wister Walcott |
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ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — In these rocky economic times, marketers need to get the most out of every penny spent on search advertising. One way to do that is to make sure “negative keywords” aren’t sabotaging your marketing ROI.

Negative keywords are the unrelated search terms that mistakenly trigger your ad. (For example, say you’re a fishing supply company selling all manner of gear. You want people to find your company when they do searches on “fish nets” and “spears”, but you don’t want people clicking on your ad who are looking for fishnet stockings or Britney Spears.) After all, every time someone who isn’t interested in your ad clicks on it, you pay for a dead-end click – driving up your costs and dampening overall conversion rates. The problem may be increasing, as well, as the search engines continue to expand the breadth of their “broad match” ad-serving algorithms, which means negative keywords show up more often in searches.

But there are simple ways to use negative keywords to your advantage. The major search platforms (Google, Yahoo and MSN) all allow interactive advertisers to exclude keywords from their campaigns or ad groups. Adding a negative keyword to your ad group or campaign means your ads won’t show for search queries containing that term. In the above example, the retailer would exclude the negative keywords “stockings” and “britney.” Or perhaps musicians playing in a wedding band would exclude the words “gold” and “diamond” from their ads, since they only want clicks from people looking for live music for their wedding – and not people searching for wedding rings. Negative keywords can also be used more broadly, for example retailers often exclude the term “free” when they don’t want their ads to show to people looking for freebies.

As Google explains in its Negative Keyword tutorial: “Negative keywords are a core component of a successful keyword list. By filtering out unwanted impressions, negative keywords can help you reach the most appropriate prospects, reduce your cost-per-click (CPC) and increase your ROI.” Yahoo calls them Excluded Words and urges advertisers “to consider adding excluded words to help guide the right kind of searchers to your ads.”

Quite simply, negative keywords are just another way to hone your target audience and get more qualified leads. Ultimately, you will get fewer clicks, but they will be much higher quality ones that are more prone to convert – dramatically boosting overall marketing ROI. Even if you’re new to search marketing, you can make a big impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns by excluding the right negative keywords. Here’s a few practical ways to get started.

Start building your negative list

The first step in every negative keyword exercise is to think of all the terms you don’t want associated with your keywords. Convene a meeting with your marketing team and brainstorm all the negative keywords you can think of. It’s a fun, and strategic, exercise. Then, use the keyword tools at each search engine, which suggest related keywords based on a term you enter. You’ll get more ideas here for keywords you want to exclude.

The specifics

Different publishers provide different capabilities for negative keywording. Google offers the easiest-to-use negative keyword tools, and several straightforward tutorials on how to use them effectively. Yahoo calls negative keywords “excluded words” and is the only search engine to offer account-level exclusion. This is convenient for words you know you will never want to match against (nude, naked etc. – depending on your business of course). All of the engines allow you to do ad group-level exclusion for terms that may be desired in another ad group. For example, if you sell flat-panel TVs and the mounting brackets for the TVs, you would block “bracket” in just the main TV ad group, in order to divert that traffic to the bracket ad group. Only MSN allows excluded terms at the keyword level, but such granular adjustments aren’t that useful.

Think outside the box

After you’ve come up with all the negative keywords you can think of, you need to go the extra mile to find ones you and your team may have missed. For all of the search engines, you can run reports to see exactly which terms people searched on to get to your ad (for Google, this tool is called “Search Query Performance Report.”) In these reports, you almost always find more negative keywords to add to your list. You can also get ideas from your Web server’s log files – the referring URL will generally show the search term used by the search engine.

Roll out negative keywords gradually

While it is easy to pick a crop of negatives, it’s hard to weed them out once they are live – because you won’t be able to see the searches. It’s better to err on the side of getting the extra traffic until you are sure there isn’t some combination with that word that could result in a conversion! Once you’ve come up with a list of keywords, test them to make sure they are having a positive impact on conversion. Eliminating too many terms can decrease overall conversion – but eliminating the right ones will have a positive impact on conversion. So it’s important to analyze click-through and conversion rate before and after you implement the negative keywords. Sometimes, you may need to bring back a few negative keywords to boost conversion on particular ads.

Stay ahead of the curve

New, trendy search terms are constantly emerging – even before your marketing team has heard of them. So it’s important to run regular reports at each search engine to see the “most searched” keywords. There may be keywords you’ve never heard of that do you DO want associated with your ads, and in that case, you should add them to your keyword list. But there also may be new terms that you DON’T want associated with your ads, and in that case, you should add those to your negative keyword list

Manage the chaos

Your keyword list is always evolving; so then, should your negative keyword list be continually updated and actively managed. Something that’s negative today, could be positive tomorrow.